Matthew Arnold Quotes
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The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
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Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel - below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.
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Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
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The World in which we live and move Outlasts aversion, outlasts love: Outlasts each effort, interest, hope, Remorse, grief, joy.
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Sanity - that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.
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Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat.
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Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
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What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.
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Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.
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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask - Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.
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Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe, Returning home on summer-nights, have met Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe, Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, As the punt’s rope chops round.
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Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.
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The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.
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Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings, By contemplation of diviner things.
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And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well - but ’tis not true!
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Peace, peace is what I seek and public calm, Endless extinction of unhappy hates.
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Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.